The National Collegiate Athletic Association, NCCA, has banned Southern University's athletic programs from postseason play, effective immediately, amid pending investigation into the academic progress rates of student-athletes. The affected teams include men's and women's basketball; women's bowling, and men's and women's indoor track.
To lift the ban, the University must re-examine and submit all Academic Progress Rates and Graduate Success Rates to the NCAA committee dating to 2009 by next Wednesday.
"Once the data is submitted and corrected, a meeting will be called with the NCAA Subcommittee on Academic Performance," athletic director William Broussard said. "They will then confirm that all the data has been entered correctly. As soon as we receive that ruling, we'll have that ban immediately lifted," The Times-Picayune reports.
Broussard said the ban pertains to only post season competition, meaning the University Southern can retain its 2013 SWAC football championship. The director is unsure whether the ban will be nullified in time for the Southwestern Athletic Conference, SWAC, or NCAA tournaments.
"We can't control when the conference basketball tournament will establish its seeding and we can't control the pace the NCAA will make its decision," Broussard said. "We're trying to work as hard as we can to get all the data in accurately so the NCAA can process it quickly. That's the one thing we can control."
The NCAA has assured Broussard that they will remove the ban and make the teams eligible to play in the tournaments as long as they meet the deadlines. However, if the Jaguars are declared ineligible for the NCAA tournament, they will not be allowed to participate in the SWAC competition as well because the winners receive automatic berths to the NCAA tournament.
"We're working as diligently as we can," Broussard said. "It's a lot of nights and a lot of weekends. We're going to continue to work until the NCAA says there's zero possibility (of lifting the bans). We're working under the assumption that if we continue to meet a progression of deadlines there will be minimal harm to the winter sports," Miami Herald reports.
The controversy regarding academic progress of student-athletes surfaced early December. The athletic department was accused of submitting inadequate and erroneous academic records of student-athletes dating to 2009 that includes some documents as far back as 2003.
